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Comment by paulftw | Hacker News Reader

Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way"

Edit: was that person the only applicant? If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?

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If you're doing root cause analysis of a system failure, you're not looking to blame an individual. If you find something malicious then, sure, deal with it. But assume good faith in all parties from the outset and you're more likely to succeed in fixing the problem.

That's no way to witch hunt.

True, the postmortem should not be focused on blaming any one person. But that doesn't mean you shouldn't ignore the presence of such crimes or prosecute them!

Part 2 of this investigation should be "whose job it was to check new principal's credentials and and how they profited from looking the other way"

That really shouldn't be taken as a given.

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence." Or by laziness, overwork, miscommunication, etc.

The key answer is in what you wrote: "whose job it was". People do jobs mostly to get paychecks, so like water flowing downhill, will avoid investing effort into anything they can avoid. The students OTOH, had a strong non-monetary motivation driving their efforts, so they obviously dug deeper and more thoroughly.

> If not why did the process identify them as the most suitable candidate?

Because hiring is entirely broken in many industries.

Yeah, but that's just an arbitrary subset of "nearly all processes are broken in most industries".

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